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“What the Heck?!” 2026: Everyone at home gets a say

Franck Nijhof October 29, 2026

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Let me start with a confession.

I work on Home Assistant all day, for a living. And still, my own home has moments where the people I live with look at me and go: “What the heck?!”

My most recent one? Profile pictures.

For the longest time, your own profile picture in Home Assistant wasn’t actually yours to change. Only an administrator could do it, tucked away in the settings. So if someone in our house wanted a different picture, they had to ask me, every time. For something that is literally your face, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

As of Home Assistant 2026.10, every user, administrator or not, can change their own picture straight from their profile. A tiny change, right? Well, my 13-year-old daughter Lilly now changes hers about every week. I’ve officially lost my job as household profile picture administrator. Best demotion ever 😄

Such a small thing, but it made a big difference in how at home she feels in Home Assistant. And that’s the kind of thing we easily overlook when working on it every day.

So, guess what? It’s that time again. For the whole of November, we’re running the Month of “What the Heck?!” 🎉

Wait, what is this again?

We always value your feedback, but don’t often ask for the tough kind outright. That changes this November. For one month, we open the floodgates. No technical words needed, no fancy format. Just one simple question: what in Home Assistant makes you go “what the heck?!”

The setting you can never find. The moment your home did something and nobody in the household had any clue why. The thing you keep missing, and can’t believe isn’t here yet. All those little (and sometimes not so little) frustrations you’ve quietly learned to live with.

We want to hear them. All of them.

We only do this once every two years, and that’s on purpose. Two years is long enough for a lot to change, in Home Assistant itself and the smart home world around it. The technology moves on, and so do our expectations of what a smart home should do. What bugged you last time might be long gone, and something new might be driving you nuts today.

Why we are doing this

This year, the Open Home Foundation has been focusing on making Home Assistant more approachable. In other words: Home Assistant should not only work for the person who set it up. It should work for everyone who lives in the home.

We’ve made good progress so far. But let’s be real: the people building Home Assistant are pretty bad at spotting what’s confusing about Home Assistant. We know where everything is. We know the workarounds. We stopped being confused years ago.

That makes us terrible test subjects. You, on the other hand, are perfect. And so is everyone in your home.

So this is your month. Complain (nicely), discuss, dream out loud, and tell us what would make Home Assistant better for you.

This year, we want to hear from everyone

Previous editions of WTH month were great. But most of what we heard came from a very specific group: the tinkerers. The people who write YAML for fun, run a dozen apps, and know what an entity ID is.

I’m one of you. We are lovely people. Please keep the WTHs coming 😄

But this year, I want to explicitly invite everybody else too.

• You just started with Home Assistant. Everything is still fresh, and that “huh?” feeling you had during setup is gold to us. Write it down before you get used to it!
• You don’t consider yourself a “technical” person. You use Home Assistant, but you don’t want to tinker with it. You want things to just work. Tell us where it doesn’t feel that way.
• You live in a home where someone else runs Home Assistant. Your partner, parent, room-mate, or child set it all up, and now you live with it, every day. Do you ever feel a little locked out of your own home? This is the group we hear from least, and probably the one we can learn the most from. Home Assistant runs entire households, and most people in those households never open a settings page.

Homework for those of us who run Home Assistant at home

If you’re the one who maintains Home Assistant in your household, I have a small favor to ask.

Go ask the people you live with how they feel about it.

Not “is it working?” because they’ll politely say yes. Ask them for real. Fair warning: you might not like all the answers. I certainly didn’t. But there’s so much to learn from that conversation. Some questions to get it going:

• What’s the one thing about using Home Assistant that annoys you most?
• Can you find what you need in the app or on the dashboard? Where do you get lost?
• When Home Assistant does something unexpected, do you understand why? And what do you do about it? (Is the answer “call you”? Yeah, thought so.)
• Is there something you’d like to do or change in Home Assistant yourself, but you don’t know how (or don’t dare to)?
• If you could change one thing about Home Assistant, what would it be?

Then bring what you hear to the forum. Even better: help them post it themselves, in their own words. Their words are exactly what we need.

How it works

All WTHs go into the Month of “What the Heck?!” category on our community forum. To keep things useful (and fun) for everyone, a few simple guidelines:

• Search first, then vote. Someone may have beaten you to it. Give their topic a vote – it tells us how common a problem is – and add your own story in a reply. Every story adds context.
• One WTH per topic. That makes it possible to discuss, vote on, and track each one.
• Describe the moment, not the solution. Tell us what happened, what you expected, and why it bugged you. You don’t need to know how to fix it, and you don’t need any technical words. “I wanted to turn off the kitchen lights and couldn’t figure out where they were in the app” is a perfect WTH.
• Be kind. We are all here because we care about Home Assistant, our homes, and the people in them. That includes the people working on Home Assistant, many of whom are volunteers, doing this in their spare time.

The category is open for the whole of November.

What happens next?

We read all the WTHs. Yes, really.

In past editions, contributors picked up WTHs and fixed them while the month was still running. I would love to see that happen again. If you’re a contributor and spot one you can tackle: go for it!

Beyond the quick fixes, everything you share helps us understand where Home Assistant needs to go next. It shapes how we make Home Assistant approachable for everyone, not just the person holding the admin account.

So, what the heck?!

Whether you’ve been running Home Assistant since the early days, installed it last week, or simply live with someone who won’t stop talking about it: this month is for you.

Tell us what makes Home Assistant hard, what makes you sigh, or what it’s like to live with it.

Head over to the forum and share your WTH!

I’m looking forward to reading every single one of them (well… at least I’ll do my very best 😅).

../Frenck

FAQ

Do I need an account to post?

Yes, you need a free account on our community forum. Signing up only takes a minute.

I have multiple things! Should I put them all in a single topic?

No, please create a separate topic for each one. There is no limit on how many WTH topics you can create. Smaller topics are much easier to discuss, vote on, and pick up.

I don’t run Home Assistant myself, someone else in my home does. Can I still post?

Yes, please! You are exactly who we’d love to hear from this year. You don’t need to know how it all works behind the scenes; just tell us what it’s like to live with it.

I’m posting on behalf of someone in my home. Is that OK?

Absolutely. Just mention that it comes from them, and use their words as much as you can. How they describe it tells us a lot.

English isn’t my first language. Can I still join?

Of course! The forum is in English, but don’t let that stop you. Feel free to use AI or a translation tool to translate your WTH. If you do, please say so in your post, and add your original text in a hidden details block below it, like this:

[details="Original text"]
Your text in your own language.
[/details]

That way, nothing gets lost in translation, and people can always check what you originally meant. This is the same approach we use in our AI policy.

Does it have to be about Home Assistant itself? What about the mobile Companion app, the documentation, or the website?

All of it counts. If it’s part of your Home Assistant experience, it’s a valid WTH.

My WTH from the last edition still isn’t solved. Can I post it again?

Yes! This is a new edition, and a lot has changed since then. Please create a new WTH, and feel free to link to the old one.

Is everything that is reported going to be fixed?

No, there is no guarantee for that. The goal is to make it easy to tell us what bugs you, for one whole month. What you share helps us understand where Home Assistant is hard, and helps shape what we work on next.

My WTH is one of the top-voted ones, so it’s going to be fixed, right?

This is not a popularity contest. Votes help us see how many people run into the same thing, but they don’t guarantee anything gets picked up.

I really want a new integration or app, so I can use my devices. Is this the right place?

No, this event is not for requesting new integrations or apps. Please open a feature request on GitHub for that.

I found a bug, and I’m comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report it?

If you are comfortable using GitHub, please file an issue there instead. That way, it ends up directly with the people who can fix it, and we can track its progress too.

I’m a contributor and want to fix a WTH. How do I let people know?

Awesome! Reply in the WTH topic and link to your pull request. That way, everyone following the topic knows something is happening.